Harmonix Blog: RockBand.com Content Has Moved

The Web Team continues our adventure of rolling all our games under the HarmonixMusic.com umbrella site, this week archiving RockBand.com. We started this back in January when we migrated the Rock Band and Dance Central forums to one big Harmonix forum, and continued it with the archiving of DanceCentral.com last month.

Comments

Does "migrate" mean "delete"? I don't see any of the old rockband.com content on the harmonixmusic site. What am I missing? No recent gameplay, goals, or even a link to the song finder or leaderboards.

I was just getting happy again about being able to look at "my gameplay" updating, the leaderboards, and following my friends progress, battles, etc. I hope you are not saying that these features are gone forever. Trying to be patient and supportive of the new forum, but this is extremely frustrating.

You shouldn't "migrate" a website if you're not ready to do so. As far as I can tell you guys just killed the official leaderboards along with all other content on rockband.com. Migrating is fine, but deleting major content is not.

I am an occasional forum reader at best, so I'm pretty indifferent to the forum (and blog) changes. I hadn't even noticed them until I was suddenly thrust here when attempting to look at the leaderboards (which I do very regularly, to track my progress and motivate more practice). Are they coming back? Tell it to me straight.

So... you guys are just going to remove all the leaderboards and song info without any sort of acknowledgement? I still play the game, and the only reason I still come here is to check the leaderboards. We need to hear some sort of response to this issue asap. You guys can redesign all you want to, that doesn't matter to me, but when you remove all Rock Band content except for the forums, that's when I start to get a little bit cheesed off.

This is infuriating - the challenge of Rockband is to SEE your own learning progress against other players. GAMEPLAY and LEADERBOARDS are essential - who gives a stuff about forums and blogs. Please clarify when you'll migrate them over or whats the point?????

Please at the very minimum keep the API that feeds leaderboard data to rockbandscores.com active. Tracking my song progress and scores and comparing to my online rockband friends really helps keep the Rock Band game going for me and many others.

I personally also really like the My Gameplay and Goals pages from the old rockband.com, but at the very minimum the leaderboards and API pipeline should be kept.

For me this wouldn't be such a huge disappointment if the in-game leaderboards actually worked. 'Sort by Rank' has never worked on the playstation so those of us who enjoy playing Rockband competitively rely on rockbandscores.com, which gets its information from the leaderboard API at rockband.com. (I believe this is how it works.)

Moving the content over from rockband.com would have been fine but it seems you just shut it down (the important stuff at least!!), which is not quite the same thing now is it!

Hey all. I wanted to pop in with some additional info about why this site migration happened and what it means for the future.

When we re launched this version of HarmonixMusic.com last year the intent was to have the current game sites (RockBand.com and DanceCentral.com) and pages for future games (such as Fantasia: Music Evolved, Amplitude, and more) all under the same umbrella. This would allow for easier access for fans of our games, and it would allow for easier management for our team.

Moving the forums was the first part of that plan, as the forums are far and away the most trafficked part of our sites. We migrated the DanceCentral.com content over last month, and migrating RockBand.com was the last big piece of the move. Having everything in one place, free of the technical challenges of the older and somewhat unwieldy RockBand.com, will allow us to focus on making this unified site better for ALL our games.

There were a number of features on RockBand.com that presented regular challenges for our small web team. Some features were built years ago by devs no longer at Harmonix and could not be easily updated or repaired when they broke, some generated a significant number of customer support complaints, and some just weren't receiving the kind of traffic that they were when we last released an RB title almost 4 years ago. We may revisit some of these features in the future, and we're already looking into the API to make sure that we're able to provide that info to 3rd party sites for people that are still invested in getting web based updates on their game progress.

We are having regular discussions about what web features we'd like to have on HarmonixMusic.com, and what features would benefit all of our titles and all of their unique communities. Your feedback will be a huge part of that process, and we want to hear what old features you used regularly, what new features you'd like to see introduced, and what ideas you have that we maybe haven't even thought of. We'll continue to check in on feedback here on the forums, as well as on social channels, and in future surveys, to make sure that the community has a voice in what the future looks like for HarmonixMusic.com.

Thank you Henry for the follow-up. With all due respect though, I do wish you guys would have asked for feedback before changing things and taking away the "meat and potatoes" of the RB features that many of us hold sacred. I realize that we who still used the Rockband.com site, may be in a minority, but dang! I'm still spending money, and buying RB dlc...playing at least once or twice a week, and striving to get into the top 100 on my overall drum rank. While I do enjoy checking into, and engaging in the banter that goes on in this new forum, it's always been about "the Game", the competition, the leaderboards and the goals for me. I'm not over stating this.. you guys are ripping my heart out here. Please don't take these features away. (ok...maybe I was over stating things just a tad, but you get my drift. I still love, and will remain ever faithful to hmx, Thanks for all you guys do)

Access to your own leaderboards again via this webpage would be excellent. Perhaps adding the "what instruments were played" info that you can see in-game for the Band Scores would be great.

Improving the options of the song database would be nice since I continue to pick up songs. Being to filter on pro upgrades and filter on all fields would be great. Right now sorting by genre isn't that helpful since it takes you to like page 1 of a hundred billion and only helps if the genre I'm looking for starts with A or Z.

Oh, and maybe having a link to the song database would be nice. Right now it seems like it is only embedded in the one blog post.

I also really liked the goals part of my gameplay as it let me see the goals that I don't have the songs for yet. Those goals don't show up in game. There are other websites with this info so I guess it is lower priority.

Thank you for the update, HMXHenry, as long as you restore the leaderboard access, and change the song library so that it resembles what it looked like on Rockband.com, then we're cool. Otherwise, this migration is a removal of vital content that keeps me coming back to the game. At the very least, have the API fixed so that I may view my scores on Rockbandscores.com. I know I'm not alone in relying on that site regularly, because the information on the old Rockband.com did not let you see all of your songs at once. I'm just furious until you fix/restore the leaderboards again, so please get on this, Harmonix team.

I miss the Leaderboards so much and as far as I know, it vanished only a day or so ago. When re-designing the My Gameplay area, would it be possible to view my entire song library along with information as to what difficulty levels the songs have been played on? When I first started playing Rock Band, there were so many songs that I failed when attempting to play on Expert, so I played them on easier levels.

Now, I'm much better and I see only the high scores on my song library list within the game, but it doesn't tell me if I ever attempted to play a particular song on Expert or if I did, how many stars I had gotten. The only way to find out is to hit the yellow button, then use the blue button to check the score details on the instrument you play. Needless to say, this is an extremely time consuming activity if you have to do it for every song with a "Hard" score on your list and when your entire song library has over 2,600 songs to review.

The other thing that annoys me to no end (not to mention band session members as well) is having to scroll through the enormous song library just to find a song that is not "grayed out". I just put up with it or let the other members choose the songs because it takes me over 5 minutes to find something everyone else has. Since adding a new filter to the game would most likely involve a game patch and I suspect no one is really working on developing new song filtration features for Rock Band, I guess I'll just have to keep dealing with it. In any case, I figured I'd mention it anyway since it's my biggest pet peeve when I'm in a band session.

I'll be ecstatic when the Leaderboards are brought back online. I depend on it so much and check it almost every day to see if I've moved up from spot #84 on Bass Scores.

This move completely screwed me over for exporting Lego Rock Band and Rock Band 2. Why are those features not implemented? I bought the games before the site move, but Lego RB didn't get to me until not even a full day after the move was made and now I'm being redirected to a completely unrelated page because you guys decided to change things up without giving fans any warning prior to doing so. I feel ripped off and I'm pissed about it.

harmonix support please hear us out your new redirection page for rock band compatibility chart is broken.. we can no longer access the page to look for information regarding roc kband compatibility.. this is totally a major headache since its difficult to find a complete compatibility chart out there since u put down the page for it.. please do get it back for us rock band enthusiasts. thanks

We ran into a pretty bad bug with blog comments on the live site that we hadn't discovered in our development environments, and we had to pull the functionality temporarily. We're looking into resolving the bug, but for now we had to remove comments entirely.

I just wanted to let you guys know that we are listening to all the feedback you've given so far, and we're looking forward to re-implementing comments when the bug is fixed.

Really makes you question future Harmonix purchases. You think about all of the money Harmonix made from the Rock Band franchise and how quickly the website is moved to a minimum budget. How long before we can only play offline as servers for the game are no longer supported?

So many mistakes with the "migration" I really don't know where to begin.

But a few simple things like:

Notify "Hey everyone, we are migrating the site and as part of that we are removing all functionality except forums. How does that sound?"

Maybe make a date far enough away so that you can receive good feedback on it.

Make sure all linkages to games are still working before a migration, especially exporting content related stuff.

Leaderboards are a huge part of the community of the game. How on earth could this be deemed as not needed?

Determine the scope of the migration before doing it. Complete the site in development and even have some people test it before going live with the migration.

Really makes you question future Harmonix purchases. You think about all of the money Harmonix made from the Rock Band franchise and how quickly the website is moved to a minimum budget. How long before we can only play offline as servers for the game are no longer supported?

So many mistakes with the "migration" I really don't know where to begin.

But a few simple things like:

Notify "Hey everyone, we are migrating the site and as part of that we are removing all functionality except forums. How does that sound?"

Maybe make a date far enough away so that you can receive good feedback on it.

Make sure all linkages to games are still working before a migration, especially exporting content related stuff.

Leaderboards are a huge part of the community of the game. How on earth could this be deemed as not needed?

Determine the scope of the migration before doing it. Complete the site in development and even have some people test it before going live with the migration.

etc, etc

If Harmonix were still rolling in the Rock Band money--and if Rock Band were making the money for Harmonix to roll in--we wouldn't be in this position. And they actually did warn us that they were folding RockBand.com into the Harmonix main site, and that they were looking into keeping the functionality they could. They did the math, and this is what works best.

Maybe if people actually spent more time on the forums and participated in it, they would have done something about it, but honestly, even a few hundred of the most vocal people probably don't outweigh the fact that in the long run they'd need to stop maintaining the API (including tweaking the code so it works on HarmonixMusic.com instead of RockBand.com). If they're generous enough, maybe they can open source it (and I kinda hope they do).